Mageia is a fork of Mandriva Linux formed in September 2010 by former employees and contributors to the popular French Linux distribution. Unlike Mandriva, which is a commercial entity, the Mageia project is a community project and a non-profit organisation whose goal is to develop a free Linux-based operating system.

To compare the software in this project to the software available in other distributions, please see our Compare Packages page.

Notes: In case where multiple versions of a package are shipped with a distribution, only the default version appears in the table. For indication about the GNOME version, please check the "nautilus" and "gnome-shell" packages. The Apache web server is listed as "httpd" and the Linux kernel is listed as "linux". The KDE desktop is represented by the "plasma-desktop" package and the Xfce desktop by the "xfdesktop" package.

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Past reviews - sort by:

Version: 6Rating: 8Date: 2018-11-12Votes: 3

Great, stable and boring distro. If your distro has ideal hardware (that works perfectly with the open-source drivers that come with Mageia), it's a smooth and comfortable enough experience that I believe it is suitable for beginners. If not you'll, of course, experience the usual hiccups, but alas that is life on Linux.

I like that now DNF (from Fedora) is available for use as its package manager, along with its old package manager, urpmi. urpmi is one of the most irritating package managers I have used in that its syntax isn't intuitive and I find myself often having to look to its man pages and DuckDuckGo searches for help to do simple tasks with it. Despite this DNF and its graphical tools for package management and system configuration are second to none in terms of user-friendliness, stability and functionality.

Its repos aren't huge (not including OpenRA, SageMath and Snap, for example), but thanks to AppImages and Flatpak (which is in its repos) most popular apps you may want are available for it. You can also install Nix (https://nixos.org/nix/) and use it to install certain apps you find aren't available as AppImages and are missing from Mageia and Flatpak's repos. Nix is also helpful for installing apps when you find packages from these other vendors (Mageia repos/Flathub/AppImage devs/etc.) have bugs, as you can install the package with Nix and use it until the bug is fixed.

I haven't had the pleasure of interacting with its community or support forums, but I suspect like most open-source projects its community will be warm, welcoming and friendly.

I grew bored of Debian, and was looking for something similar in terms of stability but different with system and package management, Mageia ticks those boxes for me, its RPM based like Fedora and OpenSUSE, but behaves more for me - unlike Fedora -

Install is easy, just read the instructions, if you are new to Linux then just read the Mageia guide. The install will take some time as you get to choose what you want in terms of packages (talking of which, when you use the Mageia Control Centre to add or remove packages, it automatically manages dependencies / orphans) and what DE you want. During the install your system will update, meaning that when you have a fresh install there will be no updates needed, quite handy!

Mageia is actually quite light on RAM / CPU, and does not cause concern for me for general use, I browse the web, listen to music, and theme to my hearts content, Mageia allows me to do everything that Debian did and provide me with an equally stable platform.